The Techfiles

Trim Those Control Panel Extensions with Visual Controls

By Adam Myers ⋅ August 28, 2008 ⋅ Tags: control panel, vista tweaks

Have you perused your Windows Control Panel lately? If you’re like most users you will probably find a half dozen or so third-party icons littered about the panel. Video card manufacturer NVIDIA is often guilty but software applications like Apple Quicktime or SUN Java aren’t far behind. Worse still, the pollution could be excusable if the functionality launched from the icons were of any use or unavailable through other means. One of the first tweaks I do on a fresh Windows install is to switch the Control Panel view to Classic which uncovers all the functionality of Control Panel in one screen, rather than Microsoft’s default grouping by tasks. In Vista, this results in thirty or so icons - the last thing I need is more icons with limited functionality from third party hardware and software suppliers!

Visual Controls is a super handy application that allows you to manage all the control panel extensions. The tiny 80KB program - though to be fair it does require Microsoft’s .NET 2.0+ Framework - provides a simple checkbox based interface to easily enabling and disabling the extensions. The results are applied instantly and are saved across reboots, which means you can use the tool to simply hide seldom used controls but still quickly enable them on the oft chance they are needed in the future.

Visual Controls is a free download and works with XP as well as Vista.

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